Every participant in the drug court sessions was given the standing option to raise a hand if they did not want to be filmed on any given day, with the crew explicitly communicating that consent from a previous week carried no obligation to the next.
Meeks deliberately set the film in spring and summer to capture the lush, green landscape of rural Ohio, consciously pushing back against what he described as the dominant cinematic depiction of the Midwest as a bleak, barren, corn-stalk landscape.
The staff sergeant at the jail who escorts Cody out of his cell in the film is the actual staff sergeant from that facility, who also advised the production on what a real inmate would have in their cell to sleep with.
A pivotal story that shaped the entire emotional core of the film came from a real drug court participant who told Meeks that when he lost his foster brother and was on his way to a dealer's house, he called counselor Annette Deao at 11:00 PM and she answered, pulling him back from relapse.
Annette Deao, who plays a version of herself in the film, had studied acting for four years before she began running the drug court program, a fact she had never mentioned to Meeks until after he had already filmed her in the short film precursor and complimented her performance.
